Communication systems employ coding to ensure reliable communication across noisy communication channels. These communication channels exhibit a fixed capacity that can be expressed in terms of bits per symbol at certain signal to noise ratio (SNR), defining a theoretical upper limit (known as the Shannon limit). As a result, coding design has aimed to achieve rates approaching this Shannon limit. Conventional coded communication systems have separately treated the processes of coding and modulation. Moreover, little attention has been paid to labeling of signal constellations.
A signal constellation provides a set of possible symbols that are to be transmitted, whereby the symbols correspond to codewords output from an encoder. One choice of constellation labeling involves Gray-code labeling. With Gray-code labeling, neighboring signal points differ in exactly one bit position. The prevailing conventional view of modulation dictates that any reasonable labeling scheme can be utilized, which in part is responsible for the paucity of research in this area.
With respect to coding, one class of codes that approach the Shannon limit is Low Density Parity Check (LDPC) codes. Traditionally, LDPC codes have not been widely deployed because of a number of drawbacks. One drawback is that the LDPC encoding technique is highly complex. Encoding an LDPC code using its generator matrix would require storing a very large, non-sparse matrix. Additionally, LDPC codes require large blocks to be effective; consequently, even though parity check matrices of LDPC codes are sparse, storing these matrices is problematic.
From an implementation perspective, a number of challenges are confronted. For example, storage is an important reason why LDPC codes have not become widespread in practice. Also, a key challenge in LDPC code implementation has been how to achieve the connection network between several processing engines (nodes) in the decoder. Further, the computational load in the decoding process, specifically the check node operations, poses a problem.
Therefore, there is a need for a bit labeling approach that supplements code performance of coded systems in general. There is also a need for using LDPC codes efficiently to support high data rates, without introducing greater complexity. There is also a need to improve performance of LDPC encoders and decoders.